BRICS Parliamentary Forum Joint Declaration Explained: What New Delhi Agreed on 27 October 2026, UNSC Reform, Terrorism and AI
Key Takeaways
- The 12th BRICS Parliamentary Forum was held in New Delhi on 26-27 October 2026 and ended with a Joint Declaration adopted by consensus.
- The declaration endorses UN Security Council reform for greater Global South representation, referring to Paragraph 13 of the New Delhi Declaration.
- On terrorism it condemns cross-border terrorism, terror financing and safe havens, calling for zero tolerance and an end to double standards.
- It backs Digital Public Infrastructure, ethical AI governance and climate action under the CBDR-RC principle.
- Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla handed the forum's chairship to China, which hosts the next edition in 2027.
The 12th BRICS Parliamentary Forum concluded in New Delhi on 27 October 2026 with the adoption of a Joint Declaration, closing a two-day meeting of parliamentary leaders from the BRICS grouping. Inaugurated a day earlier by Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla, the forum brought the parliamentary dimension of BRICS diplomacy to the capital in the same year that India holds the BRICS chairship. Its outcome document matters less as a law — a parliamentary declaration does not bind governments the way a treaty does — and more as a public record of where the member parliaments could agree, and where India, as chair, managed to put its own priorities into a consensus text.
What happened in New Delhi
The forum was held on 26–27 October 2026 at Samvidhan Sadan in New Delhi, under the theme "Fostering Parliaments for People-Centric Development". According to the Lok Sabha Secretariat's account of the proceedings, reported by the Press Information Bureau and carried by multiple news outlets, the two-day programme ended with the Joint Declaration being adopted by consensus. In his valedictory remarks, Speaker Om Birla handed over the chairship of the parliamentary forum to China, which will host the next edition in 2027.
Birla's closing message set the tone the declaration itself tries to strike. He said that permanent solutions to global challenges lie in dialogue, peace and cooperation rather than conflict, and that parliaments must evolve into transparent, accountable and citizen-centric institutions if they are to safeguard public trust. He also argued that responsible technology and artificial intelligence can significantly improve parliamentary work and lawmaker efficiency — provided they are developed with human values, ethics and accountability at the centre.
What the Joint Declaration actually says
The declaration formally reaffirms the member nations' commitment to the principles of the United Nations Charter: sovereign equality, mutual respect, non-interference in internal affairs, and the peaceful settlement of international disputes. That language is standard diplomatic fare, but its placement at the front of the text is deliberate. It frames everything that follows — on security, governance reform and development — as an argument for a world order in which no single group of countries sets the rules for the rest.
Two paragraphs of the earlier New Delhi Declaration, adopted at the BRICS Summit in the capital in September 2026, do much of the heavy lifting in the parliamentary text. The first is Paragraph 13, on reform of the United Nations Security Council. The parliamentary declaration explicitly endorses Security Council reform so that global governance becomes more representative of the Global South. For India, this is a long-standing demand: the Council's permanent membership still reflects the power structure of 1945, and India has argued for decades that a body which decides questions of war and peace cannot remain unrepresentative of the countries where most of the world's population lives. A parliamentary endorsement does not change the Council's composition — that requires Charter amendment and the consent of the current permanent members — but it adds a legislative voice to a demand usually made by governments.
The second is Paragraph 40, on counter-terrorism. Here the declaration adopts robust language condemning cross-border terrorism, terror financing and the provision of safe havens to terrorists, and calls for zero tolerance towards terrorism and an end to double standards. The wording closely tracks India's own diplomatic position, which has consistently argued that terrorism cannot be divided into "good" and "bad" categories depending on who the target is. The declaration also recalls the condemnation of the 22 April 2025 Pahalgam attack, which the previous forum in Brasilia had already condemned.
Technology, climate and development in the text
Beyond security and governance, the declaration carries a set of development and technology positions that reflect India's chairship agenda. It supports the expansion of Digital Public Infrastructure — the open, interoperable systems for identity, payments and data exchange of which India's own stack is the best-known example — and calls for ethical governance of artificial intelligence. The pairing is significant: the same forum that praised AI's potential to make parliaments more efficient also insisted that the technology be governed by ethics and accountability, not adopted uncritically.
On climate, the declaration adheres to the principle of Common but Differentiated Responsibilities and Respective Capabilities, the long-standing understanding that while all countries must act on climate change, developed countries, which contributed most to historical emissions, bear a greater responsibility. That principle has been a fault line in climate negotiations for thirty years, and its reaffirmation in a BRICS text signals that the grouping's parliaments are not willing to accept climate frameworks that treat all countries as equally responsible.
The declaration also records unanimous support for India's BRICS chairship, and, according to detailed summaries of the text, expresses deep concern over the continued escalation of tensions in West Asia, calls for maximum restraint, describes unilateral coercive measures and unilateral economic sanctions as contrary to international law, and supports a two-state solution for Palestine, with two states living side by side in peace and security in line with international law and relevant UN resolutions. On West Asia, the text notably recalls the members' respective national positions — a diplomatic caveat acknowledging that BRICS members do not all see the region's conflicts the same way, and that the declaration is a compromise rather than a single shared view.
Background: how the parliamentary forum fits into BRICS
BRICS began as a grouping of large emerging economies — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — and has since expanded to include Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, the United Arab Emirates and Indonesia, with a wider circle of partner countries. Its leaders' summits make the headlines, but the parliamentary forum is the track where legislators compare notes on how to turn summit commitments into domestic law, budgets and oversight. That is why the forum's theme matters: "people-centric development" is an argument that international cooperation should be judged by its effect on ordinary citizens — jobs, health, education, digital access — rather than by communiques alone.
India's 2026 chairship is its fourth. The previous parliamentary forum, the 11th, was held in Brasilia in June 2025 under the theme of building more inclusive and sustainable global governance, and it was there that India received the chairship for 2026. The leaders' summit held in New Delhi in September 2026 adopted the New Delhi Declaration, titled "Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability", and it is that declaration's consensus which the parliamentary forum has now reaffirmed and carried into the legislative arena.
What this means for India
For India, the forum's value is threefold. First, it converts chairship priorities — Security Council reform, zero tolerance for terrorism, digital public infrastructure, ethical AI and climate equity — into a consensus document signed off by fellow parliaments, giving New Delhi's positions a multilateral stamp that goes beyond its own statements. Second, it gives Indian parliamentarians a direct channel to counterparts in countries that are also negotiating trade, technology and energy deals with India, so that political understanding can keep pace with economic engagement. Third, the handover to China sets up the next test: whether the consensus reached in New Delhi survives a change of chair, or whether each chair simply rewrites the agenda in its own image.
What it does not do
Readers should keep the limits of the document in view. A joint declaration of a parliamentary forum is a political statement, not a treaty. It creates no legal obligations, imposes no sanctions, and does not by itself reform the Security Council, stop a terrorist network, or cut a single tonne of emissions. Its clauses on West Asia openly paper over differences among members, and its broad language on AI ethics and digital infrastructure leaves the hard questions — standards, enforcement, data flows — for governments and regulators to settle later. The declaration is best read as a map of agreement: useful for showing where a diverse grouping of parliaments can still find common ground in a divided world, but not a substitute for the negotiations that must follow.
Conclusion
The 12th BRICS Parliamentary Forum ended, as these meetings usually do, with a declaration that says more about direction than about delivery. Its significance lies in what it consolidates: a consensus, under India's chairship, that global governance must become more representative, that terrorism must face zero tolerance without double standards, and that technology and climate policy must serve people rather than entrench existing inequalities. Whether that consensus hardens into action will depend on what governments do next — in the Security Council reform debate, in counter-terrorism cooperation, and in the next forum under China's chairship in 2027. Parliamentarians have stated the position; it is now for executives to act on it.